It won't. These systems are quite large (a single solar panel is approximately 1.2m by 1.7m (4 to 6 ft ?) and even if you put it outside with direct southern exposure and no shade it takes 2-5 years to recoup the investment cost. In the US, you pay less for electricity (in most places) so it would take longer. Behind a window, generated energy will be way less.
Well the inverters with which these solar systems work switch off within milliseconds when grid power goes down, so the problem you correctly identified is taken care of. There are also multiple redundant components to ensure this behavior.
I'm German, and have installed a small (1.8kWp, 800W inverter) system myself. It's really pretty cool. It was really cheap (our system cost 750€ including installation material for the roof) and saves a lot of money (130€ since September). Ours will have recovered the upfront investment cost within the next 2 years. Our meter is currently turning backwards when we feed in, but will be replaced by a meter that doesn't (then, energy we feed back into the grid will be given away to the grid operator for free).
I forgot the coolest thing about this: We are currently transitioning from a demand-driven grid to a supply-driven grid. Previously, when more power was consumed, power plants upped their production by burning more coal, oil or gas. Now, the consumption needs to be upped when power is available via solar or wind, and reduced when it isn't. Balcony power plants do a very good job of educating and motivating people to do this.
Cryptominers are way more expensive than the solar system itself, it is questionable if they will recoup their cost even with free electricity, and afaik, it would not be easy to select an arbitrary power consumption. Power can easily vary between 100W and 800W by the second.
If my utility company wanted to install solar on my roof with their own funds and give me some energy for free in exchange, I'd support that.
But installing solar on your own roof with your own funds, and then giving the energy away for free to a for-profit corporation? How does that make any financial sense?
Don't give energy away to the operator, they don't (want to) give you energy for free either. Get something which can soak up excess energy - a battery, an electric water heater, whatever - and run that on whatever excess energy you have. Assuming you don't invest too much money in such a project you'll end up saving a bit more money and you'll avoid being fined for pushing energy into an already overloaded network once everyone and his dog have installed solar which pushes up the voltage from nominal 230VAC to somewhere around 245-250VAC (250VAC is the usual cutoff for inverters where I live (Sweden)).
I installed 14.5 kW of PV panels on the barn roof a few years ago and hooked them up to a 10 kW hybrid inverter. Hybrid inverters can divert energy (from the PV panels or from the net) to a battery which can be used at a later stage to feed consumers in the local installation or to backfeed to the net. Since we currently have a contract which allows us to sell energy at market rates we do not have a battery yet but I don't know yet what the next contract (in 2 years) will look like. Assuming that we can no longer sell at market rates I'll install around 60-80 kWh in battery capacity to soak up excess production and dump the rest in the water heater etc. If we ever get a hybrid or electric car/tractor/whatever I'll add battery capacity so as to be able to charge those with excess energy. By that time we'll be close to ready to go off-grid which is fine by me, electricity prices here in Sweden have skyrocketed due to the demand from (mostly) Germany for excess capacity since you shut down your nuclear power plants. The more transmission capacity is built in the Baltic, the higher our prices get.
A battery isn't profitable for me atm, and I have no problem giving the electricity away.
Do you have a source that shows that shutting down nuclear power plants has in any way influenced German power import? I'd doubt that. Power is imported when it is cheaper to import it than produce it ourselves (there has not been a situation yet where Germany couldn't meet it's own demand).
BTW, on the subject of batteries being too expensive it might be an interesting experiment to see how far you'd get using a common full sine wave UPS with a number of external batteries. Charge the external batteries using the inverter, pull power out of the UPS. Expenditure would consists of a UPS - you'll find these on auction sites, often without or with expired battery packs - and a number of batteries. A reasonably-sized UPS which can deliver a kilowatt or more often uses 24/48/72 volt battery packs, i.e. 2 to 6 lead-acid batteries in series. If you have a way of getting these for a reasonable price it may be worth experimenting with if you're the experimenting type (I am).
Our inverter is built for high-voltage batteries (120V to 580V) so I'm aiming for either using expired EV batteries or - once prices go down more - LiFePO4 battery stacks. As it stands prices are still too high which - calculated over the life span of the batteries combined with compound interest on the investment - makes power from such batteries cost around the same as power taken from the 'net. Battery prices are steadily going down so this situation should change, hopefully within 3 years they'll have gone down so far as to make it a worthwhile investment.
An on-line UPS is designed to run continuously. Equipment connected to such devices never directly connect to utility power, they always run off the UPS which uses double conversion (AC -> DC) to charge the batteries and (DC -> AC) run the outlets. You'll find off-lease online UPSes on auction sites, as said often without their battery packs but given that you'll want to run them using bigger batteries than normal that is not a problem.
Power is imported when it is cheaper to import it than produce it ourselves
After shutting down the remaining 6, then 3 nuclear power plants it became cheaper to import power from Sweden - which used to be blessed with relatively low electricity prices due to to the large hydro and (diminishing) nuclear generation capacity - than to generate it in Germany. While this might have been positive for Germany and for electricity producers in Sweden it is a definite negative for electricity users in Sweden who have seen their prices skyrocket. As to the direct effects of the nuclear shutdown there's quite a bit written, e.g.
For the first time in many years, Germany became a net electricity importer in 2023. The trade balance for electricity switched from 21 TWh of exports to 22 TWh of imports in the same period. Imports have risen despite sufficient plant capacity in Germany to cover domestic demand entirely. In March 2024, the country announced the shutdown of seven more coal-fired power plant units after the winter, as they are no longer needed to guarantee supply security.
This leaves aside other costs involved with the nuclear phase-out [1] and the knock-on effects of the increased energy prices as well as lower guaranteed availability which is part of the cause of German deindustrialisation. If you doubt whether this actually happening I invite you to peruse a search engine of your preference on the subject which is more effective than me linking to a number of articles from many different sources.
Why did you quote something that basically repeats the argument of the person you replied to?
> Imports have risen despite sufficient plant capacity in Germany to cover domestic demand entirely. In March 2024, the country announced the shutdown of seven more coal-fired power plant units after the winter, as they are no longer needed to guarantee supply security.
> Why did you quote something that basically repeats the argument of the person you replied to?
Because it answers his question and it is relevant in the context of Germany shutting down its nuclear power plants since this created a gap which needed to be filled with imports. Had those plants not been shut down there would not be a need to import power at the scale Germany currently does, especially not given the fact that power from existing nuclear power plants running on an existing load of nuclear fuel is far cheaper than imported power. With nuclear power the large majority of costs are concentrated in the construction phase - including all the costs incurred due to regulations - as well as the decommissioning stage. Fuel costs - including those of treating and storing nuclear waste - are but a fraction of the total costs. This means that once you have a working nuclear power plant you want to run the thing at full capacity as long as possible to recoup those initial costs and to earn income to finance the decommissioning of the plant at the end of its life. The plants which were shut down were not at the end of their useful lifetimes and could have produced many TWh of energy still - e.g. Isar 2 produced around 11 billion kWh per year and supplied around 3.5 million households with electricity which it could have continued to do for many years still.
800w is the maximum being produced, and not all of it will be fed into the grid. And it is unlikely that millions of households have all installed powerplants which are all oriented in the same direction and not shaded.
Germany is 84 million people. If 1% have solar and they currently average to 400 watts (half capacity from their 800 watts because of positional and shading issues) that is 33 Gigawatts. That much power if not managed will cause problems for any grid.
Instead of using a fixed backoff, just use a token-bucket algorithm. Try a few requests every now and then and have each successful request enable another retry.
I don't understand everything you're saying, probably because I am not involved in day to day US political discussion, but a few of your points seem wildly exaggerated or misunderstood.
No one is forcing anyone to turn any sons into daughters, are they? What you're really saying is that you don't want anyone to be allowed to change their gender. That's a quite prohibitive stance for a country that puts so much emphasis on freedom.
What's this "male perverts sharing locker room" stuff about? Who's campaigning for letting random adults into kids locker rooms?
In California for instance if the child wants to transition then you must let it. If you attempt to stop it or guide them out of the decision in any way you’re at risk of having your child taken from you. That’s the force being used, do what we say or we’ll take your child.
I believe Elons kid had this happen to him, hence why he’s so pro trump despite the fact that trump is pro oil industry. The lesser of two evils he said.
Parent got voted down because HN is largely extremist left.
I can't find any pricing info on that page except "Get started for 1$$" and then it wants me to sign in. No thanks. I'd like to know what I'm getting into before signing up.
Actually, the $1 thing is a relic, I just removed it. I have no pricing whats so ever, since all canine has to do is connect to your cluster and do all the hard work there, it is totally free :)
I've tried setting timers for certain apps, but I find myself deactivating them again and again. In the past, I've had phones that allowed me to lock myself out for an hour, which worked but was a bit annoying when I had to do something else on the phone. I wish I could lock myself out of certain apps for certain time periods with no way of deactivating it outside these time periods, e.g. Instagram, Reddit or youtube only allowed between 8PM and 10PM.
Another problem is the urge to immediately grab the phone whenever I have nothing to do. I've had success putting the phone in a bottom drawer turned off over the weekend, but that's not always feasible. Perhaps some training would be helpful, or an app that would gamify the aspect of not constantly unlocking your phone.
Thank you for sharing - it's really hard to fight human psychology. Did you try to download apps to control screentime? There are already some solutions out there, though none of them are perfect.
- First, I'm now aware that phone overuse is an issue. This wasn't obvious a year ago, even though I used it even more.
- Analyze my usage patterns. For example, I'd get a message on some app, open it, and end up doomscrolling. It helped me to change my notification settings so that I only get emails. That way, I can check it on the computer later, where I usually waste less time.
- I agree that gamifying is a good idea. It's precisely the main feature of the app I'm working on. Not only that, but building a "community": I started to talk about this problem with friends and learned from them. It also makes me more accountable; my girlfriend will nudge me to leave the phone alone if I'm stuck, for example.
Getting a (useful) notification and drifting off to other stuff is definitely a problem. Interestingly, a smart watch has helped me with that. I now read notifications on the watch, and about 75% of the time I don't have to take out my phone anymore.
